Raid 0 problems ! This will stump you

Gigabyte GA-m61p-S3
Athlon 64 x2 Brisbane (2.85ghz @ 1.4v)
Patriot DDR2 6400( 950mhz @ 4-4-4-12)
Thermaltake TP 700W PSU
Stacker 830 case


I'll start from the beginning. I got a new computer, put my old HDD's in it along with 2 new ones. My 160GB 1.5/s seagate has my windows on it and I have some data HDD's. I set up my 2 new 250GB WD caviar 3gb/s HDD's in in raid set up via Gigabyte's bios and array set up. I get my 3 1/2 prepared for installation and getting files in it ready. I install windows on my raid, hit f6 like i'm suppose to, add the drivers by specifying the controllers, install everything like normal. Get to windows, install everything like normal. Windows works fine!!

Now, whenever I restart/boot up etc and I change my boot order to my raid first, my 160GB windows second, it'll give me this error.

Hal.dll (I know what this file does) missing error of course, but I know it's not missing and/or corrupt and my boot.ini is correct and everything.

The ONLY way I can boot up using my raid windows set up is to hit F12 - select my raid array - then select my windows XP home on RAID (option #1, option#2 = XP home on 160GB) It'll boot up normal though......... with a catch.

If I don't have my windows XP cd in the drive, it will say "DISK BOOT ERROR, INSERT SYSTEM DISK". This is boggling me, since I'm pretty advanced and have installed tens of OS's over the years and reformatted plenty of times after.

So my boot process has to go through

f12
boot hard drive -> select raid array
have win XP home disk in drive
select windows XP over raid

viola! Anyways, why does it do this? When I'm in windows I check the boot.ini file and its fine. Please help!

I'm guessing that its a setting in your BIOS thats making it fail to boot properly. In the BIOS under Advanced, look for 1st or 2nd boot device. Press enter on it and select your raid set, if its there. If not, go to Boot other device and set that to Yes, then change the rest to CD or something, just to get it past that one.

See if that does it. You may also need to tell your BIOS that you have a riad set, so that it knows to boot from that. You'll usually have the options seperatly for IDE and SATA within a section in the BIOS.